In Brazil Vote, fake news spreads on social media despite efforts to end it

Facebook is monitoring traffic on its main platform and WhatsApp will try to spot and resolve issues during the vote in Brazil and the mid-term US elections on November 6th. In a conference room in Menlo Park, Facebook's headquarters, nicknamed the "war room" – decorated with a map of Brazil and an American flag – employees are responsible for tracking and minimizing misinformation on different platforms. -forms of the company, including WhatsApp.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp made it more difficult for users to transmit content around the world, and more clearly calls attacks to mitigate the spread of rumors about the messaging service. Many technology companies have also partnered with fact-checking agencies to verify suspicious messages. Shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook made it easy for users to post links to items they suspect are being manufactured.

False and potentially damaging rumors continue to spread widely in social media, according to Internet observers in the field following the turbulent elections in Brazil. They say that the battle for truth is being lost.

"All social media platforms have so far failed to create the minimum conditions for the debate to unfold without lies," says Diego Casaes, head of the Avaaz online activists network in Brazil. "There is a lack of understanding of the problem."

Nearly 135 million Brazilians are expected to vote in a presidential election that will pit right wing Jair Bolsonaro against leftist Fernando Haddad. Proponents of the two main candidates have been accused of spreading false information on social media, the main source of information for 72% of Brazilians, according to a poll conducted in 2016 by the Reuters Institute.

Election authorities are investigating businessmen supporting Bolsonaro who allegedly violated the electoral law by hiring social media marketing companies to send spam emails against Haddad via WhatsApp. Mr. Bolsonaro denied that he committed a wrongdoing.

Fact-finding groups have debunked publications falsely claiming that Mr. Bolsonaro would adopt policies against residents of Brazil's poorest regions and that his close entourage included torturers. or that Mr. Haddad plans to promote homosexuality in primary schools. Another recent message falsely described Mr. Bolsonaro pledging to eliminate the vast network of Brazilian childcare centers funded by taxpayers.

Earlier this week, a large-scale shared video on social media showed a man resembling a candidate for governorship in the state of São Paulo, naked in an orgy. The candidate, João Dória, married and father of three children, denies that it is him in the video and asks the electoral authorities to find his creator.

"We do not have a ready and effective solution for misinformation," Judge Rosa Weber told reporters Brazil's highest electoral authority earlier this week, as investigators were fighting rumors that Brazil's electronic voting posts were falsified. "We have not found a miracle."

At a recent meeting in Brasilia, government officials praised the efforts of technology companies to fight misinformation. At the same event, Brazil-based organizations struggling to demystify misinformation have indicated that they have largely failed to stem the tide of false information.

Highlighting the discrepancy, a WhatsApp manager who participated in the videoconference meeting spoke about the company's partnership with Brazilian-based factomaker Aos Fatos (which means The Facts), as evidence of WhatsApp's efforts to combat misinformation. The only problem: the members of Aos Fatos at the event denied it.

"Aos Fatos has not at any time allowed the use of its brand in association with WhatsApp in the fight against misinformation during elections," the agency said in a press release.

WhatsApp is then excused for this error.

Spokesperson Carl Woog said, "WhatsApp was designed for private messaging. This is why we have limited the way messages can be sent to our platform. In the run-up to elections in Brazil, we banned hundreds of thousands of accounts with spammy behavior. We also introduced a new tag for forwarded messages to alert people about unwritten messages by their close contacts and sponsored an extensive education campaign, including on radio, to raise public awareness to misinformation. "

Experts say recruiting local staff could help understand cultural norms to better fight against false information.

"Everyone is well-meaning, but if you do not understand the culture of a country, how can you really find a nuanced solution that makes sense in this country?" Said Claire Wardle, media expert at Shorenstein University of Harvard Center.

Samidh Chakrabarti, head of civic engagement at Facebook, who runs the company's war room, said Facebook had invited Brazilian colleagues to Menlo Park to work in the war room during the first round of elections.

Chakrabarti said Facebook wanted to "provide the maximum local context for such decisions," he said, citing incidents in which the company had successfully identified and blocked voter suppression efforts. in the first ballot.

The flood of misinformation about WhatsApp in Brazil is one of the many challenges that Facebook faces in trying to minimize the inconvenience of its services. In India, fake rumors spreading on WhatsApp have led to deadly violence, while in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, some people and groups use Facebook to spread rumors that eventually led to physical violence.

WhatsApp said it learned from the elections that took place in the Indian state of Karnataka earlier this year. During this election, WhatsApp stated that the ability of accounts to create groups very quickly was limited. Now his systems can follow this behavior, considered "spam".

Write to Paulo Trevisani at [email protected] and Deepa Seetharaman at [email protected]